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Thursday, 2 March 2017

All She Wants To Do Is Dance

MARGARET LISS:

A few years ago I scanned all of Dave Sim's notebooks. He had filled 36 notebooks during the years he created the monthly Cerebus series, covering issues #20 to 300, plus the other side items -- like the Epic stories, posters and prints, convention speeches etc. A total of 3,281 notebook pages detailing his creative process. I never really got the time to study the notebooks when I had them. Just did a quick look, scanned them in and sent them back to Dave as soon as possible. So this regular column is a chance for me to look through those scans and highlight some of the more interesting pages.

Dave Sim's notebook #8 has been featured here six times already, most recently in Cerebus vs The Spirit back in March of 2016. Out of the 100 pages originally in the notebook, only 86 pages remained, and one of those was blank. The notebook covers Cerebus #70 through 79.

While we've seen this notebook six times already, the cover has yet to be seen:

Notebook #8, front cover

A notebook that isn't a Hilroy notebook!

Page 45 of the notebook made me stop - some sketches of Jaka as she appears in Cerebus #74 - 76. Then I read the dialogue. Some sounded familiar and some didn't.

Notebook #8, page 45

This line in particular stood out: "I'm afraid that when I'm too old to dance I'll still want to." Most of that dialogue wasn't used. Instead Jaka reveals she is going to have a baby, and she is afraid that will make her ugly so she won't be able to dance for a living anymore.

5 comments:

Hi Margaret - Also an early use of Comic Art Metaphysics in CEREBUS (although I didn't have a name for it at the time): any sort of timeline that makes sense, there is no way that Jaka's hair could be this length at this point in CHURCH & STATE and then back to past-her-shoulders in JAKA'S STORY. The answer is: fractal realities. Cerebus left one short-haired Jaka fractal context in C&S and returned to a long-haired Jaka fractal context in JS.

This was also consciously using the Unhappy Jacqueline Kennedy on Air Force One hairstyle to go with this very unhappy Jaka storyline.

First, thank you for the bits and pieces from the production of Cerebus in Hell. You're right, I'll have to come up with an innovative display / storage solution, but I think I can do it. I also want to put something together for AMoC. But right now, I'm in the middle of 5 Bruins games in 8 days. Monday's game in Ottawa is giving me a chance to stay at the Regency, so if I see the Elf, I'll let everyone here know.

As for the petition - at first I got a form email response from iPetitions. Upon further questioning, this is all I got from them: "What we stated in our reply was a generalized list of reasons. In this particular case, we received numerous complaints in regards to false signatures, i.e. it appears that personal info of several persons was fraudulently added to the petition. We have no way of actually checking whether there were fraudulent signatures, and, if yes, how many, but we did notice a sudden and huge increase in the number of signatures, so we disabled the petition in order to prevent possible spamming in the near future. We will re-enable your petition, as a sufficient amount of time has passed, though we will have to remove the signatures that are reported as fraudulent."

I'm thinking the 'sudden and huge increase' of signatures is from the person going to conventions, collecting signatures and then adding them by themselves at one computer (that would raise a 'spammer' flag). It also seems that some of those signatures were from people who later voiced concerned that they did know why their signature was being collected, and that they did not want it on the petition. So without knowing who to contact about that, they contacted iPetition. Instead of contacting me, iPetition didn't just "disabled" it, they totally removed it - I had no access to anything to do with it. After I explained things to them, they sent the above email.

Thanks, Margaret. I talked to Alfonso a little while ago and he said he's been banned from four conventions, so the situation is getting a little ugly around the edges. I suggested that he post his version of events here but there was a POSSIBILITY that he was going to look into legal actions against the conventions in question. And lawyers are not really big on you telling your version of events online.

Hope it works out. Alfonso's a heck of a nice guy and has been really helpful to me over the last year or so. "They're messing with the wrong Mexican," he advised me. I smiled and said, "Oh, yeah, like there's a RIGHT Mexican to mess with."